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High-Tech Tools for Back to School

The school year has just started. Students are adjusting to their new schedules, balancing school work and social lives, and forging ahead into the great unknown.

Other than a sharpened #2 and a good work ethic, what ingredients do aspiring students require to succeed into greatness? Today’s students go beyond basic pencil and paper and require gadgets that make us scratch our heads asking, “Are you from the future?”

Here are a few of our favorite high-tech devices and tools that are making waves with students across the country.

Top Tech Gadgets for School

Smart Backpack

When I was a kid, a backpack was just, well, a bag to hold all my books and binders. Nowadays, tablets and laptops are becoming a necessity, even at the elementary school age, and most children will be carrying at least one device as they enter into their teens. With kids always on the go, how do they keep those necessary gadgets charged?

With a Smart Backpack, of course!

Smart backpacks offer docking stations, safe storage, and efficient designs to keep their electronics safe and charged. Imagine backpacks that are more optimized for wiring than your house. These models, such as the Tylt Energi, come with large battery packs that can charge devices – while they are stored in the backpack!

Smart Writing Set

Experts agree, there is a great benefit to taking notes by hand, but electronic record keeping is also extremely beneficial. New technology means you don’t have to choose.

Important hand-written notes can now be easily accessed, rather than painstakingly copying them down by hand like a medieval scribe, with the Smart Writing Set.

One of the most elegant note-taking tools I have seen is the Moleskine Smart Writing Set. Your hand-written notes will be recorded and transferred to the app, where they are easily edited and organized. You can change text color, highlight passages, delete or move objects, and easily share valuable information with friends, classmates, or colleagues.

Chromebooks are about to get better

Many students in the area are already required to use Chromebooks for school; there are even kindergartens in the area utilizing tablets for educational purposes. They are incredibly useful as inexpensive, straightforward laptops that allow students access to Google, Word processing, basic internet functions, and online backup of all their schoolwork, all of which is standard for today’s students.

Chromebooks are beautiful in their simplicity. They are inexpensive, easy to use, and have great battery life. As everything a student needs is saved to Google Drive, even if the device was thrown off a cliff, you can get a new one and everything is easily restored upon log in.

But Chromebooks are about to get a whole lot better.

If you don’t have one yet, then now is the time. The Chrome operating system will now have access to the Google Play Store, which means the new units will have access to millions of Android apps, making them extremely more functional.

Kiddie Communicator

When I was a kid, I had a small film canister that I kept quarters in for urgent calls to my parents. That’s not even a concept our children would recognize, now.

We all have to admit just how useful cell phones are, even for children. What do you do for children that are too young for the responsibility of an expensive phone, while still maintaining the ability to contact them when needed?

One of the best solutions I have seen is the FiLIP. It’s a wearable phone designed for kids. The whole operation is controllable via an app on your (adult) smartphone. The few settings on the watch allow your child to make/receive calls from five phone numbers of your choosing (like when Batman calls for Alfred).

It uses one-way text messaging so you can send your child messages, i.e. “Dinner is ready!” The FiLIP uses GPS so you can instantly find and track the location of your child. And, you can even set “Safe Zones”, which alert you when they have left the boundary areas you have set.

Head Back to School in Style

While the gadgets in this article will have their time in the spotlight, one fad that never fades is a brilliant and healthy smile. If your students haven’t seen the dentist yet, schedule a consultation with us today and we can make sure their smile is ready for school!